Dead in the Water (40 page)

Matt stared uncomfortably at the mirrored wall adjacent to the booth. “I think we should check on Nemo.”

Matt’s thin face. His stiff, set jaw that looked like it might crack. Oh, dear God, where’s the fairness?

“Yes. She’s been alone an awfully long time.” He thought for a moment. Did females feel alone when they were pregnant? They carried life inside them, such a miracle. A miracle, or a tragedy, that living creatures carried the means of their death inside them as well.

Maybe they could talk in the stateroom, without all the people and bustle.

“Okay, matey.” John saluted smartly. “Ready to cast off.”

“Oh, Dad.” Matt smiled patiently, and John felt a little better.

*  *  *

Succulent sacculena. Soul on ice. Flesh on ice
.

The ice water washed over Curry’s face and roused him from his torpor. He cried out and moved the fingers of his left hand, the ones he hadn’t broken in his fall to the deck.

He lay in fetid darkness, somewhere close, where the bulk-heads pressed on his shoulders and feet, and the floor was strewn with garbage. He gagged; had two simultaneous thoughts: that he was freezing, and that the captain had lied to him, because he was still alive.

“Mother,” he whispered.

And something nearby did, and didn’t, answer him. Boots echoed on the deck. He closed his eyes and tensed. His face throbbed. His broken fingers ached.

Curry hefted himself to a sitting position. He was drained; there was nothing left of him. He was sinking into the ship, the cursed ship; he was dying and Reade would have his soul. Damned, and deserving of it; Curry had murdered a hundred people, and he had devoured their flesh to stay alive.

A noise, distant, a piece of death.

Dead fish float, he thought incoherently. If he died, dear God, don’t let him sink. Let him float, far away, out to sea, where Reade couldn’t touch him.

Three hours of searching, and no one knew where the captain was, and they wouldn’t let Donna go onto the bridge, and no one seemed to give a good goddamn that her gun was missing.

She shook her head and folded the map she’d taken from the stateroom. She’d conscientiously gone through all the public areas, and a few reserved for the staff. Now she’d meander, in time-honored police tradition, and hope something came of it. Jeez, she had to bump into somebody sooner or later: the list of people she was looking for was growing by the minute: Phil, Elise, Ramón, Reade, anybody in charge.

What was that ship she read about in
Flotsam
, the one where everybody disappeared?
Marie Celeste
, something like
that. Yeah, well, the
Pandora
was proving to be her sister ship.

Scowling, she took some stairs marked “Crew Only.” They were steep, and dirty; she hoped she didn’t get her red dress too scuffed up. She must look great, sandals and satin. Glenn would—

Her heart became a fist. Fuck Glenn.

The stairs dropped her below decks into the bowels of the ship. It wasn’t so pretty there; no carpets and white walls, no quaint hurricane light fixtures. Just rusty, greasy guardrails and metal steps, loops of electric wires and utility lights clipped to them. No need to play dress-up for the crew, who knew what ships were really all about: grease and oil and lots of cogs and gears meshing together, and a hull that cut the water into two parts: the surface, and everything else.

The thunka-thunka of machinery slathered the air with a greasy tang of diesel fuel as Donna descended another flight of stairs and stepped out onto space on a catwalk perhaps two feet wide. The sides were flimsy and painted with Rust-Oleum, and the whole thing shook as she walked along it. To her left, riveted sections stuck out from one another like the cutaway of a dirty stereo cabinet: big shelves, little shelves, junk inside them: wrenches, Coke cans, beer bottles, paper-backs. Wadded-up cigarette packs.

A pair of snazzy bikini underpants, ice-pink with lace inserts. New, expensive. Maybe Elise van Buren-Hadley was slumming?

Donna walked on, keeping to the shadows whenever possible so she wouldn’t get busted and sent back to Go. Voices drifted by. The catwalks and cables extended in both directions; it was like being inside a blimp. Somewhere below her, the cavern must be divided into neat watertight compartments. All she saw when she leaned over the side were more catwalks and hundreds of pipes and valves. Christ, if you wanted to hide out on the
Pandora
, it would be a cinch.

She didn’t have a watch because it was on the
Morris
, but it had to be almost midnight. The air rose and fell around her like breath, and the handrails were sweaty and slick; now and then she almost heard a deep, shuddering sigh; and though
she chalked it up to machinery, the sound prickled her scalp. She was snooping around in the innards of the ship, in the greased-up guts, with the catwalks intersecting each other like hundreds of feet of intestines; the oceanic space was a giant stomach cavity. Voilà Officer Osmond, bobbing through it like some dot of bacteria.

After a second of indecision, she chose the right-most of two stairways (ladderways, she corrected herself; on ships they were ladderways) and clomped down it,
clang, clang, clang
, attention, please, here I am. Wondered idly if Captain Nemo was a mother yet.

Someone else walked down a ladderway: footfalls clanged against hers with a discordant metallic ringing that made her grimace and run her tongue along her front teeth. It was like listening to someone run their fingers down a chalkboard. She saw no one, though. She went on.

Down, farther down, where the shadows lengthened despite the lights; and the dank living smells grew stronger. Donna ducked her head beneath an electrical cord silhouetted in the gloom; and another, looped and roped haphazardly across the catwalk. Wires and cords dangled every which way, coiled around metal posts, trailing over the catwalks, punched into square blocks of extension cords. If she wasn’t careful, she would fucking hang herself.

Then from down below, a set of rolling vibrations expanded into the silence, whum,
whum
, WHUM, whum,
whum
, WHUM. They rumbled through her palms as she held the rails; the soles of her feet, her knees. Her groin. It sounded like a huge, unbalanced washing machine, or a fly-wheel when the timing was off.

Or a boy, spinning on a lake …

Donna peered below. No light shone at all. The vast blackness spread beneath her feet like a maw, and she hadn’t brought a flashlight.

Okay, time to go back up. She imagined herself a scuba diver, tapping a watch at a dive buddy and pointing her thumb toward the surface: See ya at decompression, bro.

She turned around. Saw the double stairways and decided to go up the left one this time.

Chips of ice flow with the current of the glass-clear water; ice packs the spaces between the mountains; rivulets of opaque water like rivers of solid water in a world of liquid ice
.

The frigid water and the absence of salt preserve. Centuries of wood lie scarcely blemished; rusted metal only rusts
.

Fish move in and out with the ice. They dart into the holes, the wounds, the shattered windows. They swim into the porcelain sinks, the bathtubs, the toilets, and out again. They trail the broken masts and coil around the anchors
.

Above, the sun glides over; the moon
.

The ice glistens. The fish shimmer
.

The silverware sparkles. The glasses fill with sand, empty with tide
.

Jewelry glitters. A fragment of fabric waves
.

In the captain’s chair, a body sits. It is dressed in a black suit and it wears a black cap, and an eye patch. Its hair is red and its eye, its single eye, stares through the ice. It lifts slightly with the undulation of the current; the fish swim around but do not light upon it. It sits, it stares, it dreams
.

It dreams for—

COME.

“Shit!” Donna cried, sagging against the railing. She whirled around and hung over it. Her hair fell forward, momentarily blinding her.

Panicking, she brushed it away. She was shaking all over. She was on the verge of wetting her pants.

Goddamn, what was
that
? Hallucination?

“Goddamn.
Goddamn.
” Something at her, something in her—ice water in her brains—
she’s the one—

the one

the one

Bile rose in her throat. Her hands trembled badly as she wiped her hair from her face and fought to control herself.

the one

“Fuck,” she spat harshly, and started up the stairway fast,
hard, though her muscles lurched and her mind was screaming.

Screaming.

COME.

Cha-cha stepped from the shadows as Officer Donna ran up the ladderway, for a moment diverted by the idea that he could see up her dress.

COME.

Then he turned his attention back to the hatch, oh, yes, baby, yes; maybe she’d heard it, too, and that was why she’d stopped dead and then started cussing. Oh, yes, ’cuz there was something in there, something psychedelically supercalifrage, and Cha-cha had whooped like a fire horn when he found the hatch that would lead him to it. He had spent hours looking for it, down,

down

down

in the bowels of the ship, the good, empty belowdecks, after he had … after …

He couldn’t remember, but he knew whatever he’d been doing had had something to do with a knife, which he had dutifully put back in the museum.

Now he ran his hand along the exterior metal plate. There was a slash about three inches wide near the bottom of the door on the left side. He got on his hands and knees and peered into it. Knock, knock, who’s there? Why, it’s Cha-cha, baby, ready to go down the hatch. He giggled high, very high, like a teakettle.

He saw nothing, so he stuck in his hand. Was something there? Did he hear a strange slithering noise?

“Rats,” he said worriedly, and withdrew his hand. He rose and ran his hands over the door. Not rats, no, baby. Something was in here, and it was good.

With a sigh, he laid his cheek against the metal. Never mind the grime and dirt. Diesel residue was part of nature, man, and he was into nature.

“Here I come, ready or not. Here I come.” He wrapped his hand around the handle.

And then another voice swept into his brain:

Cha-cha, Cha-cha, me boyo, me bravo. Cha-cha, move away from that place. Move

away from it
!

Cha-cha cocked his head and jerked up his hand, to show it wasn’t loaded. “King? That you, baby?”

Away from it. Away away away
. Intense, heavy, worried.

He looked around. “Your Majesty?”

“Cha-cha!”

Cha-cha ducked down and whirled around, shielding his eyes from the harsh beam of a flashlight.

“Cha-cha, what are you doing?”

“What?” He looked over his shoulder at the hatch. He had wanted very badly to go in there. Hadn’t he? There was a treat in there.

Wasn’t there?

He reached again for the latch.

“No!” the figure shouted. Cha-cha jumped. It stepped into the light, and sure enough, it was King Neptune in his captain’s uniform. “You may not go in there.”

Cha-cha squinted at him. “There’s someone in there,” he ventured.

“No.” The king slung himself over the rail and walked toward him. Halted when he was about fifteen feet away. He made a half turn, standing in profile. Such a king. Such a big guy. Cha-cha admired him, began to forget where he was, and why.

COME
.

“There!” Cha-cha cried. “Did you hear that?”

“I … I don’t hear anything.” King Neptune pivoted on his heel, slow motion. Stared at the door. He shook so hard Cha-cha could see it. “I am the captain,” he whispered. “I am.”

“Yeah,” Cha-cha said, confused. “But—”

“Cha-cha, come with me. Fast.” His Supreme Oceanic Majesty held out his arms, and Cha-cha shuffled through the rat poop and the trash and the stinky, slidy stuff toward him.

“But there’s—” He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, then rubbed his hands together. “Isn’t there someone in—”

“No!” His arm around Cha-cha’s shoulders, he bounded to the railing and flung one leg over. The way he pulled on Cha-cha, he almost fell over.

“But we should—”

The king ran up the ladderway, dragging Cha-cha behind.

Below, something called:

COME COME COME COME COME COME COME COME
.

Called urgently. Tantalizingly.

And someone groaned. Cha-cha looked over his shoulder.

“Hurry, damn you!” King Neptune shouted.

Cha-cha and his cosmic karmic commander headed for the surface of the ship.

At the top of the ladder, the captain stopped. Under control, stay under control … why this mindless panic?

There was nothing in that room. In that room, that dying room, where he sent the dead men. The sacrifices. Nothing in there.

He was the captain! He was the way, and the power, and

alone, alone, all, all—

and the waters had churned as Captain Reade, late of the
Royal Grace,
reached for the bottle and uncorked it, dear God, he was so cold; he had drifted into ice floes, and the waters churned and from the depths arose

“Come, Cha-cha,” he said in a loud voice, drowning out—

drowning out

a bad dream, and nothing else.

“My love.”

Gasping, Ruth raised her head from the sink. Her throat ached. Blood gushed from her nose and ran down her chin. Her hands were clenched around the porcelain sides and as she threw back her head and gasped for air, her knees buckled and she fell to the floor.

She sprawled on her back, staring up at the light fixture as her chest worked spasmodically. Her fists opened, closed, opened again.

She coughed and a jet of watery vomit gushed from her
mouth. She rolled over on her side, marveling distractedly that so much could have collected inside her.

And the blood! A torrent from her nose, a bucket of it as she got to her hands and knees, slipping in the wet, and pulled herself to a kneeling position at the sink. The water was the color of rust. Was there any left inside her head?